Sea Snails and the Biological Secrets of Memory

One of the great mysteries of neurobiology is how memories are stored. We have a few tantalizing clues, but the precise biological mechanism for how memories are created and where they are stored in cells is still unknown. All of your lost loves and childhood dreams, your family’s birthdays and preferences, your own name and darkest secret…nobody knows where they are in your head. And, um, we still don’t know…however, thanks to research on sea snails, we have some new clues.

Scientists have long believed that memories are stored within the structure and connective patterns between the synapses which connect neurons. The new experiment suggests that this may prove to be a misconception.

Scientists trained a particular sort of sea snail (which have “small” brains with only 20,000 neurons) to respond in certain unusual ways to electrical shocks. Then the team removed ribonucleic acid (RNA), from nerve tissue of the trained snails and injected it into the circulatory system of untrained snails. Other “control” snails which were untampered with responded to electrical shocks naturally, however the snails which were treated with RNA from snails taught to curl their tails for prolonged periods immediately demonstrated this unusual behavior.

The findings suggest that our conjecture about where memories are stored may be quite wrong…or at least disturbingly incomplete. The snail research indicates that, at some fundamental level, memories are stored in the nuclei of neurons. Now scientists will try to replicate the results in other animals to test this hypothesis. Everything in this sort of research ends of being more complicated and interlinked than initially thought, so don’t forget about those synapses just yet. We are still at the beginning of this tantalizing scientific quest.